Journal Marxist Hacker 42's Journal: Most of what humans do isn't necessary or needed 28
An interesting, but completely obvious in retrospect, revelation I had in the shower this morning.
We are at a point in world history where we can feed, clothe, shelter, and provide water for 6.5 billion people, with the labor of perhaps less than 120 million people.
Which means most of what we do for a living, what anybody does for a living- is makework on top of that to provide for wants, not needs. To make that makework profitable, we advertise about it's output. Advertising is basically lying to turn wants into needs.
So that means, at least from this autistic's point of view, that labor is really in surplus when taken as a world, that productive work is truly in shortage, and that fraud is employed to make up the difference. How does that look from a libertarian/Austrian perspective, for those more versed in the works of Ayn Rand and Von Mises than I am? How does that fit into Friedmanism and Keynesian economics, from followers of those camps who are more knowledgeable than I am? Does capitalism even still "work" under a system composed primarily of fraud, from any perspective?
You are correct sir. (Score:1)
GREED kills all. 1% steal the surplus output, and control the rest.
Why does greed have no value? (Score:2)
Why is there no value in greed? Why are food, clothing, and shelter the only proper things for people to strive for? Heck, including clothing speaks to a simplistic morality for most people on the planet, and is not truly a 'need' except that the bogeyman in the sky claimed to go nekkid is a sin.
We would not be able to feed, clothe, and shelter that many people were individual men not lazy and greedy. Laziness and greed leads to me wanting more food with less effort. Someone else sees what I'm doing to achi
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I reject your framing of the question.
Of course, I'm also about at my limits as to what I can learn by continuing to engage in discussions here. Answers generally fall back to some form of coercion, be it from his version of the FSM, a wise council of elders, or the force of the mob. Little or no room for liberty, which is a worldview that doesn't interest me in the least.
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Part of the reason for that is that I've yet to be convinced that liberty has any utility whatsoever. I agree with the anonymous coward below- we're headed towards a physically useless government, in which business will not be able to function. Local production of food will soon become paramount.
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Part of the reason for that is that I've yet to be convinced that liberty has any utility whatsoever. I agree with the anonymous coward below- we're headed towards a physically useless government, in which business will not be able to function. Local production of food will soon become paramount.
You're entirely missing the point that businesses would never let this happen.
Truth is that all this "excess" is used for entertainment, which has value to all people, for "power", which has value to some people, and to make it even more easy to produce output, which grants that individual even more leverage to pay for entertainment and power.
When I buy a candybar, I'm not buying a food sustaining item... I'm buying it because I wish to enjoy eating it. When I pay for cable TV, typically I am doing so for
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You're entirely missing the point that businesses would never let this happen.
Businesses are CAUSING it to happen. When you take more out as profit than you produce, when you eat your seed corn, it is the beginning of the end.
Truth is that all this "excess" is used for entertainment, which has value to all people, for "power", which has value to some people, and to make it even more easy to produce output, which grants that individual even more leverage to pay for entertainment and
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So........ let me just get this right... in this post you are actively arguing against the free market.
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Among other related cultural issues, yes. For the free market specifically, I'm calling its very efficiency a waste of labor and money; and its management methods extremely outdated and full of fraud.
For collectivist methods, I find even OS-360 and Unix to be better managers of resources than the free market.
For distributist methods, even subsistence farmers starving in Africa and hunter-gatherer tribes in the Amazon and the Kalahari have more freedom from time pressure to spend time on that which is actua
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that which is actually important (human life and raising families).
A value judgement I haven't seen you make with the slightest hint of a possibility of convincing me (and most others)
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A value judgement I haven't seen you make with the slightest hint of a possibility of convincing me (and most others)
Really? You mean having a next generation to continue the human race isn't OBVIOUSLY the most important thing if there is going to be a future at all?
Well, I'll back off on that a bit- of course the universe could continue without us. But if our descendants won't be in it, I fail to see the point of ANY other activity at all. You'll get the same result in the long run if w
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If we live on a level barely differentiable from apes, why should humans be considered special or in any way worth saving?
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When was the last time you saw an ape build a shelter? Not that they're not tool users, and seem to even be pre-lingual in a way, but the real differentiation between our species and other species is that we don't put up with the environment- we change the environment to our liking. We "humaniform" it. Now to some, certainly, that very fact means we're NOT saving- but then I return to solidarity and call such people traitors to their own species.
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I still don't see where you've explained why homo sapiens is worth anything except for some slightly clever evolutionary traits.
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In that case, your own life is worth nothing as well. Why should anybody give you rights or defend your rights, especially your right to life? It's a matter of solidarity with one's species in the great competition that is life. If I don't defend the lives of the pre-born, then I'm saying that ALL human life is ultimately worthless. It seems to me, that's the message you've chosen to send.
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I'm not sending a message. I'm trying to make sense of your message. While my life is worth a great deal to me, in the grand scheme of things, whether or not I live or die matters to far fewer people than 'everyone'.
The species can survive with a whole lot less of us on the face of the Earth. A few abortions here or there, a little starvation, and the occasional genocide aren't particularly dangerous to the species. Which you still haven't defended with any particular vigor. If you want to say that homo sap
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But in evolution, there is no way for any individual to know when a semi-random collection of DNA is going to be important. The entire validity of the engineering method rests on *ALL* random possibilities being tried.
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The entire validity of the engineering method rests on *ALL* random possibilities being tried.
Evolution rejects your theory. The best doesn't win. The good enough wins. And most of the contestants never even show up for judging.
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Evolution rejects your theory. The best doesn't win. The good enough wins. And most of the contestants never even show up for judging.
Evolution IS my theory- and the judging doesn't start or stop, but is a constant.
And the good enough is exactly the point. Perfection isn't required. Maximum diversity is.
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Evolution doesn't need to test every possibility to work. So, again, we are back to my point which is that not every life is valuable. Just enough is plenty.
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Evolution DOES need to test every possibility to work- if it doesn't, then an option is going to be overlooked.
Just enough is plenty for now, but not necessarily for the unpredictable challenges the future will bring. Thus, cutting off any option on purpose- is basically genocide.
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Evolution is not a guided process. Just because one set of traits may prove to be useful 10, 100, or 1000 generations from now doesn't mean it will be picked now. The winning mutation is that which causes the least disruption, not that which arrives at any predetermined goal. In addition, if you really want to see this succeed with 'every' option, then you'll need to let go of the quaint 'one man with one woman' thinking. Hell, at an even less individual level, your independent communes will likely lead to
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And yet they didn't before- over the last 1.9 million years the species has been around. And "one man one woman" is an ideal- that we have a special word for- not necessarily the reality on the ground, which is why I've *always* supported civil unions, though I'd expect any Catholic commune to go the other way on that, and instead give gay men another way to be fathers and brothers.
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But wait, just a couple of posts before, you were claiming that it was critical to the survival of the species to try, in your word, EVERY genetic possibility. Your utopia (utopias?) cannot provide this possibility.
And the priest thing? You ask men to engage in sexual deviancy (chastity) and then seem surprised that they engage in other forms of deviancy?
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2nd reply- and note, from a sustainability aspect, the surplus and profit we're eating with entertainment isn't labor, it's actual physical resources, which are much harder to expand than mere labor.
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And my answer is the first. The more food we produce, the safer we are and the more charity we can give *for various definitions of the word food*.